Back in April 2004, Sage Van Wing, then a grass-fed-beef rancher and chicken farmer in northern California, read Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat, a chronicle of his experiment to eat only food produced within a 200-mile radius of his Arizona home. "I thought, this guy did this for a year in the middle of the Southwest," Van Wing says. "Surely it ought to be possible to do the same here. So I asked my friend Jessica [Prentice, a chef and cooking instructor] if she'd join in. We picked the easiest month of the year, August, and decided to stick to 100 miles." They got a few more friends to join in, and came up with a catchy word to describe their group: locavores.
Matt Bors
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"Then we wrote a press release for the hell of it," continues Van Wing, now off the ranch and living in Seattle. "We thought, why not invite other people to join us? Within the first couple of weeks, over 800 people had signed up for the challenge. We'd really tapped a vein." In 2007, locavore was added to the Oxford American Dictionary. Van Wing and company's 100-mile-diet challenge spawned best sellers like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, influenced thousands of menus, and pissed off more than a few people, most of whom didn't realize that the 100-mile diet was meant to be a short-term thought exercise, not a barbed-wire perimeter. The local-foods movement continues to be the largest, most influential food trend in the country.
Those of us who now favor the local over the certified organic certainly do it out of deeply felt beliefs about how to spend our dollars, support producers we trust, protect our bodies from pesticides and e. coli, and preserve the planet. But the local-foods movement has also been wildly successful because it taps into the way the indie-rock generation forms its ever-shifting musical allegiances.
When I walk down East Thomas Street to the Broadway Farmers Market every Sunday, fold-up tote in hand, I'm not there to revamp the food system—I'm out to see what's new in the crates this week. Take the Olsen Farms Potatoes stand, with its ever-rotating supply of purple, red, yellow, and white lumps. I remember when Yukon Golds became the darling of early-1990s bistros, but at Olsen's stand I pass them over in favor of varieties like German Butterball, Maris Piper, or Mountain Rose. Never heard of something before? It's going into the little red bag.
When I went seed shopping for the first time this year at City People's in Madison Valley, there were shelves and shelves of Sweet 1000s and Early Girls, which are proven to work in the Northwest climate. But of course City People's doesn't stock only the tried-and-true—there's also a set of rarities for foodie hipsters and the early adopters like me. I spotted a tag on a tomato start that two of my friends had just been raving about. There! That was going to be my tomato. Should the slugs not intervene, I foresee a day when I bring my friends fist-size, bright-red tomatoes. Oh, that? I'll say offhandedly. It's a Moskvits. Heard of it? I grew it myself.
Trumpeting a band you're devoted to—or a specific farm's lacinato kale—isn't just about love for the product. It's about making the product part of you. In his book Buying In, The New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker writes about the rise of microbrands like Barking Irons, whose T-shirts have made it into Barney's, GQ, and People. If you're a Barking Irons consumer, Walker says, the important thing isn't to advertise your possession of the brand to the general public. It's to be recognized by other people who are clued in to the exclusive nature of Barking Irons. Even more important is that when you wear the T-shirt, you know you're a member of that elite. The effect reminds me of the tiny pins I affixed to my coats in high school, laying out the contours of my (social) identity as if I were drafting my own astrological chart.
In an age when we're trained from birth to acknowledge brands—and everything becomes a brand—my Moskvits tomato is yet another one. When I dice it up with a bunch of onions and herbs to make salsa fresca, who's going to know that it's a Moskvits? Only me and a few other people in the know. That's a huge part of its appeal.
A food's status has been defined by its rarity since the days when Marcus Gavius Apicius talked up the succulence of flamingo tongues. Black truffles are getting scarcer and more exorbitantly priced by the year, and thousands of people buy Opus One for two reasons: because Robert Parker gives the small-production Napa red great marks, and because everyone around the dinner table will know the bottle cost several hundred bucks.
But there's another kind of rarity valued by generations X and whatever-you-call-the-one-after-mine: specificity. In an age when I can walk into a Sam's Club near my parents' house in the Chicago suburbs and recognize three-fourths of the products from the Capitol Hill Safeway, a potato that I buy off Brent Olsen carries a special aura. It's not a 79-cents-a-pound-on-sale potato, a commodity potato, a shove-this-in-your-mouth potato, a just-a-potato potato. What am I hunting for, exactly? A new flavor, perhaps. A different texture. Something that will taste unique even when I boil it until tender and roll it in melted butter and fresh parsley like I have so many times before—if only because there's a story (farmer, market, name) wrapped around it.
